Hate crime hoaxes are nothing new, but during the “woke” overcorrection of the late teens and early 2020s, when Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer, Sports Illustrated put a man on the cover of a swimsuit issue, and everyone pretended to enjoy “Hamilton,” they reached heretofore unimaginable heights.
Consider the 2021 incident in Plano, Texas, where a white teenager, Asher Vann, was accused of “torturing” a black classmate, SeMarion Humphrey.
It was a shocking story, full of cruelty and racial animus.
It was also a total fiction.
It was March 2021 when Humphrey’s mother, Summer Smith, alleged that Vann shot her son with BBs, slapped him, called him racial slurs, and even forced him to drink urine. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and the Dallas Morning News were among the first to jump on the story, each eager to report on the supposed indignities suffered by a black teen at the hands of an evidently racist white Texan. A leader of a Black Lives Matter-affiliated group claimed that Humphrey had been “tortured for hours.” The NAACP organized marches. Vann was doxxed, and protesters gathered outside his home.
Smith, who described Vann as “evil,” made the rounds on the networks. Her attorney, Kim Cole, launched a GiveSendGo campaign “to help with the expenses of therapy and private schooling” for Humphrey. The campaign, featured on Good Morning America, raised an impressive $120,000.
This was five years ago.
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